Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday February 07, 2013 @10:35AM
from the nose-under-tent dept.

New submitter jdela writes "Finnish Minister for Justice Anna-Maja Henriksson backs expanding FInland's child pornography blocklist to also include websites with animal porn and largely-undefined 'violent pornography.' Her proposal does not have the unanimous backing of the Finnish government, with Minister of Interior Päivi Räsänen doubting the need to expand pornography blocks. Under current law, adopted in 2006, the Finnish NBI maintains a blocklist of foreign sites linked to child pornography. This blocklist is enforced on Finnish Internet users."

I've seen suppression and repression backfire over and over again, including with regard to my own parents' handling of me. When you make something as basic and integral as human sexuality a secret, taboo thing, it drives anybody with initiative and intelligence straight into it. I took it as a personal insult that fundamental knowledge was being hidden from me, so around the age of 10 I started a clandestine campaign to learn everything I could on sexuality. I was reading sexual self-help books in public libraries (this was before the internet was common) before puberty, riding my bike to convenience stores to scope out the smut mags, etc. Not because of peers, or "the sexualized media" or any of the bullshit moralists decry, but because of my parents' own apparent disrespect for me. I wouldn't stand for it, and, as an adult and parent now, I can realize that it was an unhealthy way for me to have explored human sexuality, alone and indignant.

If a child is old enough to ask an honest question, they are old enough for an honest answer. That has been the lesson I learned from my parents' mistakes, and the philosophy I've lived by as a parent myself. The goal of parenthood is to make children as responsible as possible as quickly as they are up to the task. Children must know in order to understand, and understanding is the only way they can build a framework to live in the real world responsibly and safely. Prohibition and proscription DO NOT WORK. Each person, and children *are* people, must develop in themselves informed reasons as to why certain behaviors are not healthy for them. They cannot be made proxies for the mores and tastes of others by rote indoctrination, at least, not for long. Doing that sort of thing is like coiling a spring, and as soon as they break out on their own, all of that is very likely to explode, and some don't actually survive the experience.